Thumbtack helps you accomplish the personal projects that are central to your life.

Whether you need to paint your home, learn a new language, or plan your daughter's birthday party, Thumbtack is the easiest and most dependable way to hire the right professional for your projects.

Get started by answering a few questions about your specific needs. Within hours, Thumbtack will introduce you to several available and qualified professionals. Compare custom quotes, reviews, and profiles and hire when you’re ready.

By connecting customers like you to the right pros, we enable independent professionals to grow their businesses and do what they love. We’re proud that many of our pros have doubled or even tripled the size of their businesses through Thumbtack.

Thumbtack is available nationwide for more than 700 project categories.

Team

Marco Zappacosta | Founder
Marco Zappacosta is a Co-Founder and the Chief Executive Officer of Thumbtack.

We make money on the transactions we see through our site - when we bring professionals a job lead, they pay us a flat lead fee.

Competitive advantage

There are a few ways to find local service providers today, but they are all limited in important ways:

Word of mouth is of course the most time-tested method for finding a local service provider. But while your friends might know a local babysitter or handyman, what if you are looking for a babysitter who can also teach your child Chinese, or a handyman who specializes in your specific project? More importantly, word of mouth allows for no way to compare price, quality, or calendar availability. Finally, if you have recently moved to a new area - and your social network has been disrupted - word of mouth breaks down entirely. Thumbtack allows you to find a myriad of great service providers that are outside your social network, and additionally allows you to compare these providers in a number of important ways that are not possible by word of mouth alone.

Craigslist has a deep and active network but is very poorly suited for services. Craigslist is primarily designed for the one-time exchange of goods; it doesn't make sense for a service provider to re-post their information every few days. If you are a guitar instructor today, you still are next week! Most importantly though, Craigslist is not trustworthy. It has been designed to be anonymous and there is no way to verify someone's identity or reputation. Thumbtack solves the first limitation by giving service providers their own permanent webpage where they can upload photos and videos and even choose their own URL. Thumbtack solves the issue of trust by offering a powerful combination of identity and reputation tools.

AngiesList offers a large database of service provider reviews. But that's it. The transaction must happen entirely off line, and if you don't find what you're looking for on AngiesList there is no way to leave a wanted ad so service providers can contact you. Thumbtack facilitates the transaction as well, and also helps a consumer find a service provider even if they are not listed in the database.

Finally, there are a number of narrow verticals which have had some success in childcare (SitterCity), home repair (ServiceMagic), and virtual services (oDesk and eLance). These verticals are limited to their narrow niches, and leave large swaths of the service marketplace un-served. Like eBay the local service space has many characteristics of a natural monopoly, and there is no reason for there to be dozens of verticals serving narrow niches. Just as there are not a dozen eBays, we believe there is a need for a broad marketplace to serve a significant portion of the local service space.

Thumbtack is hiring! We've been getting great traction and need more help. We're looking for a very talented software engineer. If that's you, or you know someone who is a good fit, please check out thumbtack.com/jobs.
on April 20